The present invention disclosed herein relates to control systems, and more particularly, to systems and methods for controlling, monitoring and managing a semiconductor manufacturing equipment by means of a user interface.
In general, many manufacturing processes are necessary to produce semiconductor products. In order to control such manufacturing processes, various semiconductor manufacturing equipments are constructed in the production line. In order to control various processes, the semiconductor manufacturing equipment has a control system connected through a network. For example, the control system includes a programmable logic controller or a computer. The control system sets a process recipe including process conditions and process flows to control the semiconductor manufacturing equipments. The control system monitors the respective components for control of the process recipe to mange process-related information. The semiconductor manufacturing equipment includes various components according to the manufacturing processes. In general, the semiconductor manufacturing equipment includes process units for processing substrates and a transport unit for transporting the substrates.
The control system of the semiconductor manufacturing equipment communicates data through the network to control, monitor and manage the respective processes of the semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
To this end, the control system has a control program. The control program uses the user interface to control, monitor and manage the semiconductor manufacturing equipments. The user interface has various menus necessary to set, monitor and operate the process recipes for the respective units. For example, more than hundreds of menus are provided for each semiconductor manufacturing equipment. The user may use such menus to control, monitor and analyze information according to the process of the semiconductor manufacturing equipment. In a loading mode, the user interface loads a plurality of operable menu screens into the initial main screen. In a menu selection mode, the user interface displays various information and submenus in the top side region of the selected menu screen.
In the menu selection mode, if data corrected by the user are present in the previous screen, the corrected data are lost because a conversion is made from the previous screen to the selected screen. For example, when a plurality of menus are correlated to create data, the data under creation are lost if a conversion is made from a first menu to another menu before completion of the data creation in the first menu in order to detect other data related with the data. In this case, the user is inconvenienced by having to re-create the data. Also, the screen is refreshed because the user interface receives and processes data about the menu whenever selecting the screen. In this case, the screen is converted without storage of data under edit or correction.
Also, if the user has accessed various menus by means of the user interface, even when the user desires to re-access the accessed menus, the user must select the desired menu through several menu selection processes for re-selection of the location of the desired menu. Thus, the user is inconvenienced by having to repeat the same process in order to re-access the accessed menu.